Tag: Social Bookmarking

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Social bookmarking as an archive of human selection

A bookmark says something a search result does not:

somebody decided this was worth saving.

Social bookmarking turns that private act into a public discovery system. People save URLs, add tags, group links into collections, and sometimes expose those collections to anyone who wants to browse them.

Modern services still support this pattern. Raindrop.io, for example, allows collections to be made public so visitors can browse saved links without signing in. Its documentation describes public collections as shareable pages whose bookmarks can be organized with tags and nested collections. See Raindrop.io public collections.

That is not the same thing as a search engine ranking pages for a query.

It is an archive of human attention.

Tags preserve how people understood a link

Suppose one person saves an obscure 1998 electronics page under repair, crt, and television.

Another saves the same page under retrocomputing and high-voltage.

The page itself has not changed, but the surrounding tags reveal how different people placed it in their mental map of the web.

Search engines infer relationships from text, links, behavior, and many other signals. Social bookmarking can expose the classification directly because the user typed it.

That does not make the classification correct.

Tags can be sloppy. Collections can be idiosyncratic. A popular user can save mediocre material. Many excellent pages may never be bookmarked at all.

But the mechanism is visible.

A collection can outlive its original social moment

Social bookmarking becomes especially interesting when the social layer fades but the saved links remain.

A collection from years ago may still reveal which tutorials, tools, niche sites, papers, and odd personal pages people considered useful at the time. Even if comments, follower relationships, or popularity counts disappear, the surviving URL-and-tag structure can preserve a faint map of human selection.

The map also decays.

Links rot. Domains change hands. A bookmark can point to a page that now means something completely different. Public collections can be made private or deleted. Tags lose meaning outside the community that used them.

So a bookmark archive is not a perfect historical record.

It is evidence of attention.

For Dead Internet Theory, that distinction matters. Search rankings show what a machine currently decides to surface. Social bookmarks can show what actual people once chose to keep.

Those two maps overlap.

They are not the same map.

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Delicious: the dispersal of collaborative bookmarking communities

Delicious asked very little of its users. Save a link, slap a word or two on it, move on. But because those labels were public by default, a personal filing habit produced something collaborative: anyone who visited a tag’s page saw what the crowd had saved under that word, newest first, with nobody asking for permission or a profile. It was invented, as many useful things are, out of annoyance — Joshua Schachter built a spreadsheet and then a script to track links he kept for the Memepool community, and launched del.icio.us publicly in September 2003. The site gave “tag” its modern meaning on the web and made that word a small engine of discovery.

Tagging made bookmarks a shared instrument

The magic was that the system ran on people’s self-interest and exposed the residue. A programmer saving a page under “ruby” was doing chores for herself, but the tag view turned that errand into a recommendation to every stranger who looked. “Popular” and “recent” pages surfaced what a wide web of readers were collectively paying attention to, and following another user let you sail through one informed person’s collection as a browseable reading list. Bookmarks read as quiet endorsements, so the community was effectively a very large, very casual peer-review board. Before recommendation feeds existed, the crowd’s bookmarks were the recommendation feed. By the end of 2008 Delicious claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique saved URLs, and the service’s role as a discovery instrument looked settled.

What exporting could not carry away

Then ownership did the damage no feature could. Yahoo bought Delicious in December 2005 and mostly let it sit. In December 2010 a leaked Yahoo slide listed the service under “sunset”, and panicked users began exporting their collections and defecting, most visibly to the leaner Pinboard. Yahoo clarified it would sell rather than kill the site, and in April 2011 it was sold to AVOS, the new venture of YouTube’s founders. The relaunch that September shipped without core features, deleted the support forum, and replaced community discussion with an email address; “stacks”, a Pinterest-style grouping feature added later that year, was converted back into tags by August 2012. Science, Inc. took over in May 2014, Delicious Media in 2016, and in June 2017 Pinboard bought the shrinking thing for about $35,000 and made the site read-only effective June 15. Ceglowski said he bought it in part so it “wouldn’t disappear from the web“.

Users were still able to export their bookmarks — the export tool that a previous owner had disabled was switched back on days before the freeze. A dump of your own URLs is exactly what it sounds like, though. It did not preserve the network those bookmarks had been nodes in: the live tag pages, the “popular” list, the feeds of users you trusted, or the shared context of who saved what, under which words, with which notes. The public record of a community’s attention could not be zipped. The site survives as a read-only archive — del.icio.us now greets visitors as “a ghost, haunting the internet“, a museum of links past where you can still log in and recover your old data. The corpus remains; the collaboration does not. Users dispersed to Pinboard, Pocket, and newer services, and the dispersed part that never came along was the shared instrument that made bookmarking feel social.

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StumbleUpon: the end of a shared culture of web wandering

StumbleUpon’s whole point was that you should not have to know what you wanted. Registered in late 2001 by four students at the University of Calgary, it grew into a browser toolbar with a single Stumble button. Pick a few categories — say, astronomy, photography, and bad puns — and each click opened a page chosen from what people like you had recommended. Camp described it in a 2007 interview as a hybrid that blended “collaborative human input with machine learning techniques, so users could discover great content they wouldn’t have thought to search for.”

Search assumed you knew the target

That was its bet against Google. Search was excellent when you knew exactly what you were looking for; StumbleUpon was for everything else. It borrowed the metaphor of channel surfing — surf directly between relevant content instead of searching, scanning, clicking, and going back. The service held nearly 500 topics, and your picks over time tuned the stream. Serendipity was a feature, not a side effect. Camp said he designed it so people could “stumble upon” sites recommended by like-minded people “[r]ather than presented with the most popular sites for a given keyword.”

Recommendations were a collective act

The engine ran on judgment. Thumbs-up on a page entered it into the database and shared it with others of similar taste; thumbs-down taught the system what to avoid. Users could also submit pages directly, add reviews, and friend the people whose taste they trusted. By 2007, Camp reported, 2 million members were stumbling about 5 million times a day and adding 16,000 new URLs daily. Every user was a curator, and the crowd’s taste — not an algorithm’s template — decided what surfaced.

The feed model replaced wandering

The slide was gradual. eBay bought the service for $75 million in 2007 and returned it to its founders in 2009. Then, chasing Pinterest and the social feed, StumbleUpon redesigned around an Activity stream, Trending pages, and a “StumbleDNA” profile that told you how much of you was tech. The wandering engine became another personalized feed, and traffic steadily declined.

The shutoff

In May 2018, Camp announced StumbleUpon would fold into Mix, a new discovery app from his studio Expa. Over the years it had delivered more than 40 million users personal content, serving up nearly 60 billion stumbles. On June 30, 2018, accounts were transitioned, and the site was gone. StumbleUpon.com still points toward Mix, which remains a web-discovery service built around finding and saving links from across the web. It is a descendant rather than a restoration of the old Stumble button and its public thumbs-up culture. What ended was the particular collective act: the human ratings that once helped steer where the rest of us wandered next.